Monet and the Impressionist Cityscape

Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin 

 27 September 2024 – 26 January 2025 

For the first time in Europe, the Alte Nationalgalerie is presenting Claude Monet’s three earliest views of Paris in a collaborative exhibition focused on the Impressionist cityscape. Using this series of 1867 as a starting point, the exhibition explores how Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists discovered the metropolis as a subject for their art. 

With a clear thematic focus, Monet and the Impressionist Cityscape showcases around 25 works of painting, photography and graphic art. Claude Monet (1840–1926) is known as one of the most renowned landscape painters of Impressionism. Monet and the Impressionist Cityscape at the Alte Nationalgalerie shows, however, that his artistic treatment of the modern city of Paris also had a considerable influence on the painting of his period. 

In April of 1867, the still little-known artist painted the city from the colonnade of the Louvre. Usually artists came to the museum to study and practice copying the Old Masters. Now, Monet was literally turning his back on this tradition, instead painting life in the streets in the growing metropolis. Beginning in the mid-19th century, Paris underwent a profound transformation of its urban plan. Directed by the prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the radical changes in the city involved tearing down medieval structures and establishing in their place wide boulevards and avenues, representative squares and extensive parks. Modern architecture and comprehensive infrastructural measures led Paris into the industrial age. 

A section of the exhibition is dedicated to the ways in which painters, graphic artists and photographers documented and reflected on these changes. 

Monet was one of the first to recognise new subject matter in the city under Haussmann with its new visual axes and perspectives. In the spring of 1867, he painted three cityscapes from the balcony of the Louvre. In their radiant brightness, the intensity of their colours, a rapid application of paint and their new perspective, they differed fundamentally from traditional city views. 

Today, the paintings Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, Quai du Louvre and Le Jardin de l’Infante (1867) are found in the collection of the Nationalgalerie, at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag and at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College (Ohio, USA). the three institutions have allowed for a very special reunification of these important works. For the first time since their creation, it has become possible to view all three together in Europe in a single exhibition. 

The exhibition also shows just how consequential Monet’s view from the balcony was for the development toward a new Impressionist urban landscape. Monet became a trailblazer for artists such as Auguste Renoir, Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) and Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), but also for Maximilien Luce and Henri Matisse, who would likewise discover modern Paris for their art. 

Monet himself continued to paint the metropolis, for example with La Rue Montorgueil, à Paris. Fête du 30 juin 1878 (1878). Now held at the Musée d’Orsay, it is one of the artist’s last depictions of Paris. 

With the exhibition Monet and the Impressionist Cityscape, the Alte Nationalgalerie is marking the 150th anniversary of the first exhibition – in 1874 – of the Impressionists in Paris. In the rooms adjacent to the special exhibition, visitors can furthermore discover a new presentation of the preeminent holdings of French Impressionism, and can view for the first time the newly acquired sculpture L’Implorante (petite modèle) (design 1898, cast around 1905?) by Camille Claudel. 

Monet and the Impressionist Cityscape is the final exhibition curated by Ralph Gleis as outgoing director of the Alte Nationalgalerie. He is supported here by Josephine Hein as Curatorial Assistant. Additional programming for the exhibition is offered in cooperation with the Institut Français Berlin. The exhibition has been made possible by the Freunde der Nationalgalerie and is sponsored by the Berliner Volksbank. 

Catalogue

A catalogue featuring numerous colour plates is being published at the occasion of the exhibition by Hirmer Publishers, in German and English editions, edited by Ralph Gleis and Josephine Hein (paperback with flaps, 120 pages, 60 colour plates, 21.5 x 2.5 cm; ISBN: 978-3-7774-4403-1). With essays by Ralph Gleis, Frouke van Dijke, Josephine Hein, Ana Nasyrova, Hubertus Kohle.

Images